Compiling status reports - best practices 1) Call for reports - Are usually sent to freebsd-hackers@ CC freebsd-current@ as the lists with the most usual suspects for submitting reports. Forward to developers@ as well. Also ping individuals which are known to have something cooking. - The xml-template is at: http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-sample.xml and the generator CGI at: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/monthly.cgi at the time of this writing. Make sure to keep them up to date with regard to categories to pick from and place them prominently in the CFR - otherwise people submit plain text reports and you have to format them yourself. 2) In the past we usually had to extend the deadline by a week in order to get everybody to report. Starting early with kind reminders seems to help ;) 3) The following groups have written very nice reports for the last rounds: portmgr@, secteam@, re@ and deb@ for the FreeBSD Foundation. Various conference organizers - depending on the season: BSDCan (info@bsdcan.org) May, EuroBSDCon (info@eurobsdcon.org) Sept, AsiaBSDCon (secretary@asiabsdcon.org) March. Our readers seem to value these reports, so we should try to get them in if at all possible. 4) Putting it all together: - Copy and paste all reports in a single .xml file and use tidy(1) to get it well formatted. Usually s without a description are missing the closing "/>" which is the cause for most of the errors you will encounter. Sometimes other closing tags are missing. - Invoking tidy with the following options seems to cause the fewest problems: tidy -xml -i -wrap 74 -latin1 -preserve - Some special characters still break with that - noticed when sos@ submits a report. - Remove empty "" sections, they cause a strange looking newline. - The part usually needs a hand to make it proper html. Use here, not . - Lists come out best if you close the

before and start a new one after, like: ... blabla:

  • some item

Some more blabla ... 5) After a couple of iterations of the above, wrap the whole thing in a report template: July-September 2006

Introduction

SUMMARY GOES HERE

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy reading.

soc Google Summer of Code proj Projects team FreeBSD Team Reports net Network Infrastructure kern Kernel docs Documentation bin Userland Programs arch Architectures ports Ports misc Miscellaneous Categories are subject to change obviously. They come out in the order as stated in the report. After another round of tidy(1) try to balance the categories. Put things where they belong best, retire categories that don't fill up, etc. Adding it to your local build and looking at the html helps. Make sure you have an up-to-date doc tree. 6) Sending it out: - Commit, hooking the report XML to the build but not linking to it from anywhere. This gives time for other committers to review and suggest minor changes. - After a few days, collate and commit the changes. Also update the next due date in status.xml and link to the new report. - Add a news entry to head/share/xml/news.xml. Template: June-October, 2006 Status Report

The June-October, 2006 Status Report is now available with 49 entries.

- Extract a text version with the command lynx -dump -nolist report.html > report.txt and prettify it. - Send out To: hackers, CC: current, stable. New email to: announce@. This needs to be approved, so find someone who can do that before you start. 7) Repeat.